By the time you read this, something truly dreadful might have blighted the world. Pinker does not prophesy that this won’t happen; he simply reminds us why it should not and need not, as long as we don’t give up the notion of the emancipatory power of reason to help illuminate the way forward. If that is naive, even more naive is the belief that despair, fatalism or superstition supplies a credible alternative.

Detective Ed Gillespie has made the ancient Greek philosopher part of Baltimore Police Department’s annual in-service training. Here are some suggestions for what should be on any police force’s reading list.

Seeing animals as too like or too unlike ourselves are equal and opposite mistakes. The way to avoid this error is not to imagine that other animals are more human-like than they really are, but to accept that we are more like other animals than we generally believe.

Given a choice between complex cogitations and simple emotional reactions, most of us, most of the time, opt for the latter. This choice is usually automatic and unconscious. The emphasis on empathy encourages us to indulge this weakness, to believe that feelings are all we need to be better people in a better world.

If we are sincerely interested in the truth we can use expert opinion more objectively without either giving up our rational autonomy or giving in to our preconceptions. I’ve developed a simple three-step heuristic I’ve dubbed ‘The Triage of Truth’ which can give us a way of deciding whom to listen to about how the world is…

In an exclusive introduction to his new book A Short History of Truth, celebrated philosopher Julian Baggini takes on the thorny problem of veracity, uncovers ten types of truth and examines why, now more than ever, it’s our most valuable commodity.

From time to time, not very often, it looks as though the world has given philosophy a job to do. Now is such a moment. At last, a big abstract noun – truth – is at the heart of a cultural crisis and philosophers can be called in to sort it out. Send them back…